Netflix’s My Life with the Walter Boys has become a new fan-favorite! Based off the 2014 Wattbook of the same name by Ali Novak, the YA series follows a teenaged girl named Jackie Wilson (played by Nikki Rodriguez) who ends up in the care of the Walter family, a family of 10 sons. There, she meets Alex Walter (Ashby Gentry) and troubled Cole Walter (Noah LaLonde).
While Ashby and Noah’s characters don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on the show, that couldn’t be further from the truth IRL! Keep reading for our exclusive interview with the two actors, who say the Netflix cast was like a ‘chosen family.’
Hilariously, Noah revealed that he actually read the entire book My Life with the Walter Boys is based on “sitting in this little booth in Panera Bread.”
“It kind of opened up my world,” he revealed to J-14 exclusively. “And when you read a book, you always start to go to visualization. You start to think of the characters, what they’re going to look like. In this case, I’m one of them, and I can locate the people that I need to put in my brain. So, that process of getting through that, then getting the scripts, then meeting everybody, it all just kind of slowly forms into this world that ended up being the best environment personally, professionally, ever.”
He said of the cast, “Everybody’s the greatest group of people I’ve ever got to be around, let alone work with. So yeah, it was like a seamless transition into a new family. It was fantastic.”
And there was no lack of brotherly love while on set — what with their being 10 actors playing brothers on-screen!
“We probably all looked like brothers, and we hung out brothers and we got to be on screen like brothers,” Noah gushed. “It was great, except for [Ashby and I], didn’t really get to be very brotherly for most of the show,” he laughed, before Ashby added: “We definitely fight like brothers on the show.”
The familial atmosphere on set definitely helped with the cast’s brotherly bonding — Ashby even told us a hilarious story that included a baseball bat and some apples.
“We went out back and we took these apples that they had in the kitchen and we were swatting them with the baseball bat,” Ashby recalled. “And then the wardrobe department starts running over to us like, ‘Stop, you’re going to get your clothes dirty.’ So that’s a little glimpse into the vibe we had on set.”
“It’s chosen family,” Noah summarized. “We got really lucky with each other and with the whole group, and [I] kind of can’t even put [it] into words. The whole experience has been just amazing.”
Love J-14? Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for fun, exclusive videos with your favorite stars.
